Whoa! Didja get the numbers off that truck?!?

October 12, 2001 - 3:08 p.m.

Rainy Day

Nothing is more relentless than water. IsnÃ­t it strange that the thing we have the most of inside of us can cause so much damage to the things we own?

IÃ­ve been battling the onslaught of water ingress on a worn out flat roof on my house. The real solution of course, is to call a roofing expert, write a check and be done with it. Well itÃ­s the middle part of that last sentence that I have a problem with. Besides, IÃ­m philosophically opposed to flat roofs in general. Unless you live in the middle of a desert, flat roofs are a bad idea. Water falls from the sky, it collects on flat things and around here it freezes. WaterÃ­s best friend is gravity. Water combined with relentless freeze/thaw cycles and gravity will conspire to find a way into my happy home.

The solution to my flat roof problem is to build a more conventional roof over it. That will turn my balcony into a more useable three season porch. Very nice. Very expensive. I do a lot of things to my house but adding a new roof to the back of it is not one of them. There are professionals for that sort of thing that will be happy to accept my check and do a great job. And my job is to enjoy the results. But thereÃ­s that check thing again. I will do this, as soon as I can write the check. But I need a job for that.

So I was out there again with my roofing tar and caulk gun. But it wasnÃ­t your normal size caulk gun. I have the Big Ass Size caulking gun thatÃ­s over a foot long, and I bought two Big Ass Size tubes of roofing tar. You can put this stuff on a wet roof; it displaces the water. The roof is currently covered with rolled roofing in overlapping sections. What has happened is that over the years the joints that were tarred shut have frozen, thawed and heated to boiling over the last ten years or so. This has caused small cracks in the seams to form. TheyÃ­re so small you canÃ­t see them unless you look hard. So I laid down a bead of tar along the length of all of the seams. IÃ­m tired of messing with this damn thing. I had done some of the seams earlier in piecemeal fashion, catching the obvious cracks. This time I did the whole thing whether it looked like it needed it or not.